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\[T\]o be a self is not merely to be continually becoming, but also to exist, in the emphatic sense in which 'existence' means that one is consciously aware of one's becoming and, within the limits of one's situation, responsible for it. Thus one is aware, above all, of one's real internal relatedness \ -\- not only to one's own ever-changing past and future, but also to a many-levelled community of others similarly caught up in time and change and, together with them, to the all-inclusive whole of reality itself. But one is also aware, relative to this same whole of reality, of one's own essential fragmentariness and of the equally essential fragmentariness of all others. With respect to both time and space, the whole alone is essentially integral and nonfragmentary, having neither beginning nor end and lacking an external environment. This is not to say, however, that the whole of reality is experienced as mere unchanging being, in every respect infinite and absolute. On the contrary, insofar as the whole is neither merely abstract nor a sheer aggregate, it must be like the self and anything else comparably concrete and singular in being an instance of becoming, or an ordered sequence of such instances, which as such is always finite in contrast to the infinite realm of possibility and relative and not absolute in its real internal relations to others ("Process Theology and the Wesleyan Witness": 29).
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Closely convergent with this, I believe, is a statement of Hartshorne's in which he says of theism's assertion of the existence of God:
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\[A\]lthough the question is not empirical in the scientific sense, it is experiential in that direct experience can suggest its truth to those on a higher level of consciousness. Mystics have often claimed to experience God, and I do not see that atheists can, in an equally intelligible sense, claim to experience God's nonexistence. There is a phenomenal meaning for the presence of God but not for the sheer absence of God. . . .
In feeling ourselves, as we do, to be fragments of reality, we are somehow feeling that whole of which we are fragments. We have, however, only our experience as model for the idea of the all-inclusive whole in question. Hence the whole can only be for us an inclusive experience, a super-experience if you will. It cannot be a mere machine (which is an empty schema anyway), but only the primordial, everlasting, or eminent form of awareness ("In Defense of Wordsworth's View of Nature": 87). |
Or, again, I think of how Hartshorne argues elsewhere for the claim that "the idea of God is a reference to direct experience" from "our very definition of perfection as 'superiority to all other beings that exist or could exist'."
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